A Product Design Sprint is a highly structured, time-boxed approach to finding the right solution to a business problem. It is an immersive and highly collaborative process that incorporates ideation, simple prototyping, and rapid user testing—all crammed into the span of one exciting week.
Innovative companies use Design Sprints to define new products, improve existing products, and test ideas in a low cost / low-risk environment.
The Design Sprint method was the brainchild of Jake Knapp at Google Ventures. Based on Jake’s experiences at GV, he created the process to incorporate theories and practices from design thinking, gamification, and rapid software prototyping. Google Ventures has fully embraced the process and regularly conducts Design Sprints on their own portfolio companies.
Design sprints are popular within the startup product communities, but many enterprise companies are unaware of the process or how it can help their organization. About half of the design sprints that we run have been for enterprise companies. Below are the 5 biggest benefits our enterprise customers see from running design sprints.
5 Benefits of Using Product Design Sprint in Your Enterprise Business
Discovering and embracing customer empathy
Including your users in the discussion of a problem forces stakeholders to acknowledge the customer viewpoint and makes the problem more “real.”
By interviewing and testing the proposed solution with actual customers early, you can uncover usability flaws and develop a better understanding of what the user needs the product to do.
Aligning your team around a product or vision
When all your stakeholders are in agreement about the desired outcomes and how the solution will behave, you can eliminate the impact of product conflicts down the road.
The process uncovers gaps in your organization’s understanding of the problem and of potential risks or impacts of the solution.
Validating your Assumptions
If you are using psychographic data to make data-driven decisions, you can validate that the real-life users behave the way the data predicted.
Rapid Prototyping eliminates the cost and time impacts that come with building a full product before testing for usability and market fit with customers.
Making Rapid Decisions
Enforced time-boxing will boost your team’s creativity and focus. The first goal of any sprint is to make decisions about assumptions to test, so your team will be forced to come to agreements rapidly or let the decider make the call.
Without all the regular distractions and demands on your team that happen in a typical workday, the team can focus on the solution.
Going from concept to testing, a prototype in a week is about as time and cost efficient as it gets. We have seen enterprise clients complete the equivalent of 4-5 months of discovery and product design in just 1 week’s work.
Team Building
The process is purposefully immersive and collaborative. When a cross-organizational team is locked in a room for a week and told to solve a difficult problem, it is intensely unifying.
When everyone on a team feels like their voices and ideas are valued, everyone brings their passion to find the best solution.
Summary
Running a design sprint isn’t a silver bullet, but it is a powerful tool that allows, not just startups, but also enterprise companies to innovate around ideas and create validated product prototypes in less than a week, with minimal capital.
Let SolutionStream run a design sprint for your company to see the benefits yourself.